Wednesday, July 13, 2011

PayPal announces phone-to-phone NFC support, cuts eyes at Google (video)

Still eager to do business with a company that'll lock your account on a whim and side with the buyer regardless of the facts? Splendid! If that's you, PayPal would love for you to know that it has announced a new phone-to-phone NFC payment application at MobileBeat 2011, offering Nexus S owners the ability to request and transfer funds between handsets. As of now, the functionality is quite limited -- there's just a single smartphone with the hardware capabilities to take advantage, and there's no phone-to-anything not a phone supported as of now. In other words, this isn't exactly a Square killer just yet, but it's definitely something for the sued folks at Google to pay attention to. We're also hearing that P2P transactions through PayPal are gratis "if using a bank account or existing balance in the customer's PayPal account," but no one's coughing up details on what'll be deducted in the form of fees when using a different method of payment. A video demo of the 48 second transaction awaits you after the break, but sadly, there's no details on how soon it'll be made available to the public.

Update: It'll be available in the Android Market "this summer."